


Elysium

by nicasio_silang



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, M/M, One-Sided Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-09
Updated: 2012-05-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel Löwe is a Swedish national.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elysium

It’s quiet and cold in the early dusk of a February afternoon at the dockside park in Lilla Essengen, Stockholm. Dean isn’t dressed for the weather. He’d never been to Stockholm before; he’d never been north of Duluth. It’s 4pm and the sun is nearly done setting. The bench beside the path is crusted in snow, so they stand. Castiel is watching the lights on the ice, his hands in gloves and buried in his pockets, a scarf wound high enough to cover his ears. They’re two blocks from his apartment, but haven’t gone there yet. Cas met him at the airport, they took a taxi, then walked here to see the view. Dean has his duffel bag with a week’s worth of clothing slung over his shoulder. There’s a creak of water from under the ice, and the lamp of a boat moving away towards the city center.

Clouds are muting the sunset. Dean’s hands are bare and freezing. Castiel looks like someone else, like some random European guy.

“Do you have to go to work tomorrow?” Dean asks. He watches the frost in the air when Cas lets out of a long breath.

“I took a couple days off.”

The words are exotic in his voice. Cas has a job, Cas has an apartment, Cas lives in this city and has neighbors, he has coworkers. He takes the bus downtown. That’s all been true for a couple years, so it’s not a novelty, not really. But Dean wasn’t here to see any of it happen. Until now there was something ridiculous about the idea of Castiel existing anywhere on Earth. Sam would report that Cas had emailed about a new job, and Dean would chuckle because _Castiel has an email address._

The sun’s gone, just spikes of light like eyelashes behind the trees and roofs of another island. The cold worms up under Dean’s sleeves. Cas reaches over and takes his bag from him, says, “Come on.”

The neighborhood looks swanky, but really everything on the way here looked this clean, this well-maintained. A city in a glass case, or just somewhere Dean shouldn’t be. They reach Cas’ apartment, a newish tower block in steel and red. Cas leads him up the stairs, throws over his shoulder that it’s only on the second floor. Says it on automatic like he tells people that all the time while he’s taking them up here, digging in his pocket for keys.

It’s the first door at the top of the stairs. A quick exit, handy, but for all Dean knows that’s incidental. He waves Dean in ahead of him, and Dean stops right inside the doorway, brought up short by the unlit interior. There’s a moment of Cas in the narrow hall right up next to him. He’s wearing some sort of aftershave. He steps back and flicks on the lights. 

There are maps everywhere. Framed and unframed, hung on the walls, stacked and spread on top of a wide desk across the room. Two small yellowing maps in black wood frames are right across from Dean in the hall, detailing the US state of Mississippi circa 1850. The Natchez Trace is already there, that long road where he and his father put to rest the ancient spirit of a highwayman. 

Cas drops his keys on a breakfast counter, drops Dean’s bag on the couch. He takes off his gloves, loops off his scarf. The tips of his ears are red. He slips out of his coat. It takes Dean a bit too long to remember to walk further into the room. This isn’t a museum. 

“This is a really nice place,” Dean says when he means _this looks so normal._

Cartography obsession aside, it could be anyone’s apartment. Maybe that’s the point, because Cas is standing there with his gloves in his hands, biting his lip, looking around like he’s checking it for something. A half-finished virgin sacrifice, maybe, or massive mock-wings built out of paperclips. But no, there’s just a magazine face-down and covered in pieces of unopened mail. There’s a mug and a dirty dish on the side table. There’s a green sweater hanging off the back of a chair. 

“Do you,” Cas clears his throat. “Do you want something to drink?”

“You kidding me, twelve hours on a plane? I want everything to drink.”

Cas gives him a half-frown, but goes into the kitchen to get something. It’s not until the sound of ice clinking into glasses finds him that Dean realizes he’d never told Cas that he hates flying. It seems like an important thing, considering, but then again bringing it up now might sound like he’s trying too hard. Weighing up miles traveled in an airborne death rocket against months of not calling. 

Dean’s on the couch lacing and unlacing his fingers in front of him. Cas comes back with two glasses and a bottle of vodka. He pours generously for them both, sits down next to Dean, and raises a toast. 

“This is weird,” Cas says. Dean laughs once, hard, and takes two swallows of liquor. He really hates vodka straight. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Pretty fucking weird.”

With that established, the drinking goes well. 

Cas likes the new job, and he’s thinking of taking a long vacation in the spring. Turkey, or maybe Lebanon. Dean votes for Lebanon-- Missouri has a great springtime. Cas pours another drink. 

Dean tells him that Sam says hi, but he knows that one already. Lisa’s okay, it’s complicated, but they keep in touch. Ben’s in his third year of high school. That one blows Dean’s mind, but Cas just nods. He’d only met the kid once, for a few minutes when he came by to pick up his newly forged passport. 

“You still have that thing?” Dean asks. He remembers making it, using the same photo as the old FBI badge that barely got any play. 

“No. There were some difficulties with my supposed citizenship status the first time I tried to find work. A friend of mine helped sort it out. Castiel Löwe is a Swedish national.”

“You.” Dean stops, tries again. “You _told someone_?” Cas sets his glass down.

“I told a friend. Who I trust.”

“Well, I sure as shit don’t.” Cas laughs. It’s ugly. “Who the hell is this person?”

“Her name is Greta. You wouldn’t know her. She got me my first job. She got me this apartment.”

Someone here, when it was empty, when it was half full, explaining how he’d need a bookcase, maybe two. 

“When you had been here, what? A couple weeks? Dude, you gotta be,” Dean shakes his head. “You gotta be more careful than that. Christ.”

Through the open window comes the long, low sigh of a boat sounding its way through the dark. A beat, and then another answering, playing keep-away. On the wall across from where they’re sitting is a wide, framed map of the Indian Ocean in black and white and blue. Dean knows Castiel is watching him because he can see it reflected there. The angle of his jaw makes a sharp shadow. It’s a familiar, thin glare, but from some slight man in a long-sleeved cotton shirt, with his hair curling over his ears, with body heat and his third glass of liquor. 

“What?” says Dean. The answer is immediate.

“Why are you here?”

“You gotta ask that?” He thumbs the rim of his glass. “We’re friends, aren’t we. Been through much together. And Sam, you know. He hates trading war stories.”

“You want to talk about the war.” Subtleties of intonation haven’t come with time. It’s a plain statement.

“No, man, no, I just. It’s been a while. Isn’t that enough?”

So Castiel tells him about a _haugtrold_ he’d befriended on a drive up north in the summer, and about driving, and then as they’re both leaning far back into the corners of the couch, drunk, tense, he tells a war story from longer than long ago. 

“And when we were through with them,” he ends it, “Their detritus and flotsam drifted away to form the new rings of Saturn.”

Dean’s pretty sure he’s supposed to laugh, or be impressed. Nothing flippant comes to mind. A silence stretches. Cas stands up, puts the glasses away, comes back. 

“Get up, I’ll show you the guest room.”

 

In the morning, Dean takes a shower. Under the spray he finds that the old selfish fantasy has gone sour. Added to it is the dark bedspread he’d glimpsed through an open doorway. Cas on top of him, inside him, is going slow, going awfully slow, looking into his eyes and saying, _Is this what you came here for?_ Dean says no, no to the fogged glass door. He comes brief and sloppy just as the water’s started to go cold.

With a towel around his waist, there are five steps from the bathroom to the guest room. He makes it two, then there’s a hand on his shoulder. 

“It faded.” Cas only touches him for a moment, but lingers close by. “Of course it faded. It’s been a while.”

“Yeah.” Dean brings a hand to the scar, compulsive. He hitches the towel up an inch. “It’s been five years now.” 

Cas scrunches up his face, maybe counting backward through the months. It’s his third winter here, Dean could tell him. Dean could tell him that he’s the third person in as many years to touch his shoulder. Instead, he asks if there’s coffee.

Later, when he’s dressed, he finds Cas in the kitchen pouring coffee into two mugs, pouring cereal into two bowls, shaking in a handful of raisins. 

“Dude, are you trying to kill me?”

“Actually, I’ve been told that feeding a human will keep it alive. I’ve had variable success.” 

He pushes a bowl across the breakfast bar and hands Dean milk that comes in a box with a plastic cap.

“Somebody’s sassy in the morning.”

The milk is weird. Dean couldn’t say why. It hasn’t gone bad, it’s not unpalatable or chunky. It looks whiter than normal milk. He eats all the raisins in his first bite. 

“You should see the Old Town today,” Cas is saying. “It’s impressive.”

Dean wants to say, on principle, that he isn’t here to sight-see, but he’s in freaking Europe. There’s a foreign country right outside. He says yes. 

Collecting his jacket from the hall closet, he finds it nearly bare. There’s a shelf holding one hat, one scarf, one pair of gloves. A rail with his leather jacket, Castiel’s long wool coat from the day before, and, far to the side, a ghost. Jimmy Novak’s trenchcoat. It looks newer, cleaner. It must have been hanging long enough to work all its wrinkles out. A button on one of the cuffs is undone. Dean’s holding the edge of its sleeve when Cas walks up beside him.

“I kept it because,” Cas says. But there’s nothing to finish the thought with. 

“You left with one change of clothes, a fake passport, and 2,000 Euros. Of course you kept it.” Cas smiles for a second.

“They don’t even use Euros here.”

“Seriously? Are you kidding me, I have 100 in my freaking wallet right now.”

“Then you’ll make a wonderful tourist.”

 

They take a bus, and then a train. It’s late morning, so there isn’t much of a crowd. Cas still does that inappropriately staring at strangers thing, but he’s learned to pull it off more subtly. He closely observes the shoelaces of commuters, and their pant legs. Dean catches him watching the neatly painted fingernails of a young blonde woman. 

From the train, Cas points out a tall white building in a row of tall white buildings.

“That’s where I work.”

“That’s the strangest thing you’ve ever said.”

The Old Town is a city drawn by a child, all crayon yellow and orange and red. On the ground, the snow has melted, or been shoveled. Some is packed hard between the cobblestones. Some lingers on the steep roofs above, curling over the edges and threatening, but never falling. It’s a bit like being inside a snowglobe before it’s shaken. 

They wander in an unorganized tour, neither really taking the lead. Once in a while Cas will nod at something he’s deemed significant and say _Järnpojken_ , or _Riddarhuset_ which might be the names of things, or a commentary on them. Dean keeps an eye on other tourists for a hint at how to be one. There are a lot of people taking photos, but Dean hadn’t even thought to bring a camera. He tries to imagine what it would look like, a photograph of Castiel wandering up a narrow street in Stockholm, the walls bending over him, the snow collecting on the toes of his shoes. It’s right in front of him, the image, but still he can’t conjure it. His brain keeps making additions, subtractions.

Cas leads Dean into an antique store. It’s narrow, packed, smells of sandalwood. The shopkeeper knows Cas, he has something in the back for him. Another map. It’s of a place and in a language Dean doesn’t recognize, though he’s sure he’s seen a leather-bound text or two in the same script. Cas rolls it up and tucks it into a small tube. 

Dean lingers nearby, listening. Cas sounds different in Swedish. The long vowels suit him. When he introduces Dean and the shopkeeper, Cas speaks in accented English, and it’s unclear whether it’s a habit or an act. 

“Dean, this is Valter.” 

He shakes one of Dean’s hands with both of his own. 

“Dean, yes. Cas said you would come.” The name comes out _Kaz_. “You’re here to help, or...?” 

“Um.” Everyone is looking at Cas, and Cas is looking at the door. Dean says, “Just a social call.”

“Of course. Do you like our city?”

“It’s great, yeah. It’s big.”

Valter is visibly unimpressed. He smooths a thumb over his mustache.

“Yes. Well, you are here at a good time. The lights are supposed to come out tonight. The Northern Lights? He has a good view, out on Lilla Essengen.”

“Yeah. He does.” Dean looks over his shoulder, and finds himself alone. “I better catch up.”

Castiel is waiting a few doors down. They fall into step. The tube with the map is tucked into his pocket, most of it sticking out behind him, a jaunty tail. 

“You know, if you do need help with something--”

“I don’t.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“It’s personal, Dean.”

“Yeah, whatever, fine.”

They reach a courtyard, then a bench with a view of a cathedral. Snow skitters off the bell tower in a breeze. Cas sits down and hands Dean the map. He sits, he doesn’t open it. He can’t read it anyway.

“It’s northern Syria. And southern Turkey.” 

Dean says, “You don’t have to tell me anything.” It earns him a squint-eyed glare.

“It isn’t,” Cas starts, then starts again. “It’s only a hobby. My resources are inadequate. I can’t afford to travel very often.” 

“If you ever need hand,” says Dean.

Church bells begin to toll the hour. There are families milling around the courtyard, posing together in front of statues, chasing pigeons. There is a line of three old men on a bench across the square, each in a sweater and two coats, each with a cigarette loose between their lips, each reading pages from one shared newspaper. Sunlight is breaking up the cloud cover.

 

“You’ve seen this before.” 

Dean thinks he sounds disappointed, which is some sort of progress. They’re on the small balcony of Castiel’s apartment. All down the side of the building, people have turned their lights out and are standing outside by ones and twos, watching the sky.

“Yeah. Just once, though. I was a kid, in Washington, outside of Bellingham. It was one of those nights, you know, things were tight so we were sleeping in the car.” Old snow sits untouched on the railing. Dean lays his fingers into it one at a time, melting until he hits ice. “It got cold, so I was awake. And then it was, it was there. I was looking up through the rear window, and I couldn’t move too much or Sam’d wake up. But it was _right there_ , almost right on top of us.”

“Did it look like this one?”

“Yeah, definitely. This is greener, though.” It swings out a new, thin arm that’s hidden by a cloud. “It’s weird. When I remember it, it’s like there was a noise. Like it made a sound.”

“What did it sound like?” His voice holds more strain than the question warrants. Dean finds his eyes in the dark.

“Don’t really know anymore. Was probably the wind. Why, can you hear something?”

“No.”

They listen. There’s a breeze from the south, and from below there are somebody’s footsteps in the slush. Dean can hear Castiel breathing. He can hear the moment Cas opens his mouth to speak.

“I used to come here, a long time ago. There was no city, not even a settlement. There was a forest, the same forest, it went on forever. It was cold, but I didn’t know that. I knew it was dark, beautiful, austere. My brothers and sisters and I would come here to watch the lights.”

“That’s why you’re here now? The light show?”

“I am here because I had to choose somewhere. Anywhere.” He says it by rote. “I wonder though, sometimes, if any of them are ever here with me.”

The aurora hangs a deep pink curtain into the midst of itself. It sighs, or he does. Some of Castiel’s neighbors are talking softly on the balcony above. 

“You’re better off without them.”

“Maybe. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They’re even worse at keeping in touch than you are.” 

“I kept thinking you’d come back. Pretty stupid.” Dean nods back towards the open glass door behind them. “You’re looking settled here.”

It isn’t funny, but he laughs.

“All this, these things.” Cas raises a hand minutely, a gesture encompassing the island, the city, the balcony, the room behind them, the walls, the couch, the dark hall to his bedroom, the maps. “After I moved in here, it was several months until Greta visited again. The space came with a bed, a table, those chairs. The look on her face then, when she saw that it was exactly the same... I explained, or tried to. That made her unhappy. And so now there’s all this.”

Dean could say that it’s just stuff, that it doesn’t mean or say anything. But he’s been staring at this stuff for the past two days, trying to make it tell him something. 

Castiel starts to say _I didn’t want_ , and then _I don’t need_ , and even _It makes me feel._ It seems that none of these lead him anywhere. Dean watches him become angry with himself. The aurora casts a sickly shadow across his cheek.

“You know, at first Lisa, she’d take me to one of those big box stores. You can get bacon, a frying pan, and a stove to cook it on, that kind of place. She’d be getting things for her studio, and school stuff, and she’d point me towards whatever she figured I never got around to having. Movies, or more car stuff, or shoes that weren’t boots. That was cool, it was, it wasn’t bad. But I swear, every time I’d wind up at the back, looking for a new gun, looking over the knives.”

“You don’t think we can live with civilians,” Cas says. 

He’s closer by than he was a moment ago. When Dean breathes in, it’s the warm air of shared space.

“I don’t think they can live with me. You’re better at this, though.”

The sky is dimming; clouds are moving together, closing in the gaps. The orange night glow of the city takes over. 

“I’ve missed you, Dean,” Cas says. Then adds, “I miss the war.”


End file.
